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Power Management Patches For Nouveau, Finally

09-15-2010, 09:00 AM

Phoronix: Power Management Patches For Nouveau, Finally

While the Nouveau kernel mode-setting / DRM driver has been living in the mainline Linux kernel for nearly one year and the open-source developers working on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver have a working Gallium3D driver (we have updated Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks coming out during Oktoberfest), their support for NVIDIA power management has always been a struggle. The Nouveau power management situation though just received a big boost, that will hopefully lead to finally allowing your NVIDIA GPU with this open-source driver to run cooler and pull less power...

Comment

Excellent. I've been debating over whether or not to install the blob on my laptop, but managed to hold off and stick with nouveau despite it leading to a battery life of under 45 minutes.

This is definitely the news I've been looking for.

As for the memory re-clocking... I think that only applies to discrete cards since IGP's use system memory.... so lacking memory clock control and fan control have no relevance to me since neither are applicable to my system.

The good news is, of course, that my chip is an NV40, which means that its supported, if only by the skin on its teeth (its got crooked pointy yellow teeth and bites hard).

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Some IGPs anyway have some memory ... like side port on AMD/ATI GPUs which allow powersavings by not acessing system memory.

Here's the thing though... only if the nvidia card is recent enough that you SHOULD have bought an AMD card (and it is therefore your own fault). Any older than that, and IGP's are all on the main memory.

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While Nouveau developers are doing very good work, I still hope that Nvidia at-least provide them with proper hardware documentation so that they (Nouveau developers) don't waste their precious time reverse engineering the official driver. I don't want/need a blazing fast driver, just fast enough for daily mainstream tasks with a bit of compositing (while I can have my games on my aging xp with scorching nvidia hardware+driver).

Can we try with an open letter to Nvidia (anyone with good writing skills) and let people sign it? May be they'll ignore it, but we should still try. Has such effort already done?

Comment

While Nouveau developers are doing very good work, I still hope that Nvidia at-least provide them with proper hardware documentation so that they (Nouveau developers) don't waste their precious time reverse engineering the official driver. I don't want/need a blazing fast driver, just fast enough for daily mainstream tasks with a bit of compositing (while I can have my games on my aging xp with scorching nvidia hardware+driver).

Can we try with an open letter to Nvidia (anyone with good writing skills) and let people sign it? May be they'll ignore it, but we should still try. Has such effort already done?